Dishes Born at Delmonico’s

The trick of a hot crust over frozen cream was not wholly new in 1894, but the name was Ranhofer’s, and this is one of the earliest times the dessert appears in print in America. He called it “Alaska, Florida” — a small joke about temperature, the frozen north wrapped around the tropical warmth of the meringue-browned shell. The dish is built on a Savoy sponge, hollowed and filled with banana ice cream, then sheathed in meringue and flashed in a hot oven just long enough to color.

The claim: not the first ice-cream-in-pastry ever conceived, but the printed recipe that fixed the name “Alaska” to the dish and carried it into the American repertoire.

The most-told story runs like this: a sea captain named Ben Wenberg demonstrated a chafing-dish lobster in cream at Delmonico’s in the 1870s; the house put it on the menu as “Lobster à la Wenberg,” and after a falling-out between Wenberg and the family, the letters were shuffled into “Newberg.” Whatever the truth of the anecdote, the recipe itself is here in Ranhofer’s hand — and note how he hedges the very name in his title: à la Newberg or à la Delmonico.

The claim: strong. The dish is inseparable from Delmonico’s, and this 1894 text is the authoritative early printing — cream, Madeira, egg yolks, a whisper of cayenne.

No breakfast dish is argued over more fiercely. One camp credits Lemuel Benedict, a Wall Street broker who (the story goes) ordered a hangover cure at the Waldorf around 1894; the other credits Delmonico’s, where a Mrs. LeGrand Benedict is said to have asked for something new for lunch. The argument may never end — but only one side has a primary source, and it is this one. Ranhofer’s 1894 book contains a recipe titled “Eggs à la Benedick,” and it is, unmistakably, the dish we know: toasted muffin, ham, poached egg, Hollandaise.

The claim: disputed — but this is the earliest printed recipe matching modern Eggs Benedict, which is exactly why it belongs in the conversation.

Ask ten butchers what a “Delmonico steak” is and you may get ten cuts — a boneless rib, a shell, a top loin. The ambiguity is the point: the name never described a specific cut so much as a standard of quality set by one restaurant. Ranhofer settles at least his own house’s version, and it is generous: a twenty-ounce sirloin, two inches thick, beaten down, broiled, and timed to the minute.

The claim: the cut is debated forever; the name traces cleanly to Delmonico’s, and here is the house recipe.

The dish that time forgot — and the one that best captures the Gilded Age table. Diamondback terrapin was the great luxury of nineteenth-century American dining, priced above lobster, and Delmonico’s preparation was its most famous rendition. Ranhofer finishes it exactly as he finishes his lobster Newberg: cream reduced, thickened with yolks, sharpened with cayenne, and lifted at the last with sherry or Madeira.

The claim: a period signature of the house, and a vivid window into what “special occasion” meant in 1894.